July 31, 2014

The National Science Foundation is spending over $200,000 to find out why Wikipedia is sexist. The government has awarded two grants for collaborative research to professors at Yale University and New York University to study what the researchers describe as “systematic gender bias” in the online encyclopaedia. […] Noam Cohen, a columnist for the New York Times… has asserted the encyclopaedia is biased because articles about friendship bracelets are shorter than entries about baseball cards. “And consider the disparity between two popular series on HBO: The entry on Sex and the City includes only a brief summary of every episode, sometimes two or three sentences; the one on The Sopranos includes lengthy, detailed articles on each episode,” he wrote.

The very fact that a site exists which gives an exhaustive, 4000-word-plus citations treatment of Ant-Man is going to skew male… Men (well, those of a nerdly bent) tend to be interested in trivia and obscura; women tend to not be, or at least not so much. I don’t care about Ant-Man, but for some reason I find comfort in knowing that someone out there does care about Ant-Man, and has digested Ant-Man’s fifty year history for me, should my life ever depend on knowing when Ant-Man married Janet Van Dyne… So the real [feminist] complaint boils down to this: The ten percent of a website which could reflect the cultural preferences of its unpaid volunteers does in fact reflect the cultural preferences of its unpaid volunteers, and yes, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine does get a more exhaustive, nerdishly-loving treatment than Sex and the City.

The federal government needs to pay people to study this and propose “solutions”? It occurs to me that we’ve spent $202,000 for a “study” which deliberately avoids a very simple explanation: Women just aren’t as interested in this type of crap as men. You don’t have to believe that to at least agree: This should have been one of the explanations scientifically studied, if we’re going to have a scientific study at all.

June 16, 2013

If reviewaggregators are anything to go by, Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel has offended professional critics much more than cinemagoers. Quite a few critics, perhaps those of a certain age, seem to be pining for Richard Donner’s decidedly non-threatening film from 1978. A film I also remembered fondly from childhood - until, that is, I watched it again a few years ago - and whose gentle tone Bryan Singer tried to recapture, resulting in the dull and horribly misconceived Superman Returns. So. Which version, if any, floats your boat? Richard Donner’s whimsical Superman: The Movie, with Christopher Reeve, turning back time and kittens stuck in trees, or Zack Snyder’s rather more earnest Man of Steel, with Henry Cavill, alarming first contact and 3D megadestruction? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments. And spoilers, obviously.

September 07, 2009

Imagine for a moment an alternative twist on the Superman mythology. What if the infant from Krypton had entered Earth’s atmosphere just a few hours earlier – and had landed not in Kansas, but in the Ukraine? And what if that prodigious alien child had been raised by collective farm workers whose values were at odds with “the American way”? How would the arrival of a superhuman being alter a supposedly egalitarian society, and how would it shift the Cold War stalemate of two military super-powers? Would utopian dreams and the power to impose them lead to massive state control?

Published in 2003 as a three-issue mini-series and soon to reappear as a deluxe hardcover volume, Mark Millar’s Superman: Red Son delights in such reversals and the questions that arise. In a skewed nod to the 1940s animated series, a Soviet TV broadcast announces: “A strange visitor from another world who can change the course of mighty rivers, bend steel in his bare hands and who, as the champion of the common worker, fights a never-ending battle for Stalin, socialism and the international expansion of the Warsaw Pact.”

Millar develops an intriguing premise with a story spanning geological time, fusing events and figures from real history with those of the comic book’s own. (Stalin figures prominently, as do Eisenhower, JFK, rogue Batmen, the suppression of free speech and anxieties over terrorism.) Millar’s inverted global scenario also features a not-so-United States, in which Georgia, Texas and Detroit are fighting for independence. In a suitably perverse manoeuvre, the fate of American capitalism – and liberty itself - hinges on a brilliant and amoral scientist named Lex Luthor, a man with presidential ambitions and an estranged wife named Lois. The obsessive and brutal Luthor must stop Soviet expansionism and avert the twilight of the West, armed only with a hand-written note and a piece of alien jewellery - found, naturally enough, in Roswell, New Mexico.

The influence of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen is detectable in Millar’s neatly symmetrical conclusion, but Moore’s influence is particularly felt in how Millar suggests a superhuman being might inadvertently change his adoptive society and the broader geopolitical world. As Superman deals with an increasingly routine shipping disaster, the man of steel ponders his impact on those he protects: “Sometimes I wonder if Luthor and the Americans are right. Perhaps we do interfere with humanity too much. Nobody wears a seatbelt anymore. Ships have even stopped carrying lifejackets. I don’t like this unhealthy new way people are behaving…”

Millar’s book is in part an elaborate riff on Superman#300, in which the rocket from Krypton lands in neutral waters with both Soviet and American forces eager to claim its contents; but it’s also a character study, albeit one of an alien refugee from a long-dead world. (The book’s title is both a play on our hero’s Communist outlook and a reference to the cause of Krypton’s destruction.) The reversal of political backdrop and inversion of the familiar inevitably raises questions of nature and nurture, and throws into sharp relief both the contradictions of Communism and the comforting assumptions behind this all-American symbol. With its graphic hybrid of Soviet Expressionism and Fifties comic book styling, Red Son is an engaging yarn, and likely to reward long-time comic fans and newcomers alike.

July 18, 2009

I was invited… to offer a piece for a show titled “Monsters?” I looked at the list of invites and then imagined all of the usual takes on what a monster is thought to be. Perhaps some will be cute, some ugly. I went in another direction. What if I were to paint a realistic version of something usually thought of as cute and benign?

March 11, 2009

Speaking of comic adaptations, here’s something for enthusiasts of incomprehensible kitsch. Marvel.com has unearthed episodes of the Japanese TV Spider-Man, or Toei no Supaidâ-Man, originally broadcast in 1978. The pilot episode is embedded below. It’s a heady mix of lobster monsters, giant robots, astro-archaeology and kung fu, and it’s not always easy to follow. You may want to bite down on something, possibly your own neck.

If the above is too rich to take in one sitting, you can always sample the trailer.

March 09, 2009

My review of Zack Synder’s Watchmen has materialised at the Eye blog. I’ve assumed that most of you are already familiar with the plot (summarised here, detailed here), so I’ve focussed on whether or not a good comic makes for a good film. Feel free to dispute my findings or add musings of your own.